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On the one-year anniversary of the terror attack in St. Cloud, Minnesota, where Somali refugee Dahir Adan walked into the Crossroads Center shopping mall and began stabbing shoppers (as he asked his victims if they were Muslim) and shouting "Allah akhbar," the media is still remarkably unclear about Adan's motives.

The attack was later claimed by the Islamic State, which declared that Adan was one of their "soldiers".

But one year after Adan’s rampage, newly unsealed court filings detailing the FBI’s early response underline the difficulty that persists in trying to unwrap the young man’s motivation and determine whether he had any guidance from virtual terror planners abroad.

Days after sending more than 20 agents to St. Cloud to interview scores of witnesses, the FBI obtained search warrants for Adan’s social media accounts, the Toyota Camry he was driving when he struck a bicyclist on his way to the mall and four digital devices, according to court filings. But authorities still say they may never know what sparked Adan’s decision to bring two Farberware kitchen knives to the mall that night.

FBI special agent in charge Richard Thornton told reporters last year that the bright young college student may have been radicalized “almost overnight,” growing withdrawn and scolding relatives for not being more devout [...]

Authorities have not found contacts between Adan and operatives of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, instead pointing to witness statements that Adan shouted “Allahu akbar,” an Arabic phrase meaning “God is great,” and that he first asked some victims if they were Muslim before stabbing them.

Despite recounting the official claims of the attack by ISIS, testimony of the victims, and acknowledgement of Adan's increasingly radicalized behavior, there still remains a great mystery to his motive according to the Star Tribune.

It seems what is going on is that the Star Tribune is taking the FBI saying that they can't find a direct connection between Adan and ISIS and trying to gin that up into a controversy about what his motive was. However, these are not correlated issues.

To our knowledge and based on what has been reported, there is no indication that Adan ever claimed a direct connection to ISIS.